The Seattle Underground Tour

The Seattle Underground Tour Reviews

Seattle was burnt to the ground, and the current city sits on top of the old city. This tour goes through the underground city. That said, there's the Underground tour, then there's the night tour... don't take the kids.

First off, it starts with drinks in the pub, but most importantly, it covers the rest of the stuff that the normal tour doesn't touch. Do you know what major shipping company got it's start running heroin on the docks? To this day, there's railings in the city that have been built with special anti-prostitution devices in order to keep the prostitutes off of 1st Ave. Locals walk by them every day without knowing why they're there. The Underground Tour is fun and a traditional Seattle attraction, but catch the night-tour and you'll get a lot more interesting (if not child appropriate) information.

Usually don't like tours but the Seattle Underground Tour was particularly cool. Basically, after a big fire burned the whole city down in 1889, they rebuilt the entire city a few dozen feet higher than it had previously been built to prevent flooding. Most of that underground structure still exists, and basically there is an underground network of tunnels and remnants of old buildings that exists under the current city. This subterranean world was used for both smuggling alcohol and prostitution and has a rich and interesting history in and of itself.

The Seattle Underground Tour gives you a really good overview of this history and also allows you the opportunity to walk around in some of the underground tunnels. The tour guides seemed very knowledgeable and entertaining so I would definitely recommend checking it out!

After a fire burnt down then Seattle, it was decided to build the city a few feet higher because of fear of flooding. The tour takes you underground through tunnels (which were streets at the time) and the remains of old buildings. The tour is very interesting because it weird to think that 100+ years ago there was a city built below the modern streets. The tour guides are very knowledgeable and give you all the history. They now offer a tour catered to adults called "Underworld Tour". This tour includes discussion on prostitution, opium trade and other R-rated material. If you are coming to Seattle, I would recommend this because its very rare to see something like this.

The Seattle Underground is only assessable by taking the Underground Tour from Pioneer Square. The underground is the result of bad city planning in early Seattle. Originally the city was built on a flood plain, causing toilets to back-flush every high tide. After the great fire of the 6th of June, 1889, the city council wanted to raise the level of the city to two stories above the flood plain, but local businesses refused to. The council took the obvious way out - when they rebuilt the city they built the roads in Seattle two stories high. For several years this meant that pedestrians had to climb a ladder to get from the sidewalk up to the road, and then climb down on the other side. Several drunks died when they fell into the gutter. Eventually businesses put up a second level of sidewalks on the street level (with glass tiles to let light into the lower level), and finally the lower level of sidewalks (the original ground level) were abandoned completely, along with the first two stories of all the buildings. The underground tour gives a very entertaining presentation of Seattle's early history, followed by walks into the underground.

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